CAIRO: The Cairo Criminal Court submitted a 203-page report Saturday outlining the reasoning behind the verdict in the Suzanne Tamim murder case, which sentenced perpetrators Mohsen Al-Sukkari and Hishan Talaat Moustafa to death.
The report was submitted for the Supreme Court to rule on, as the final appellate court makes decisions on the reasons for the verdict, rather than a retrial.
Construction mogul Hisham Talaat Moustafa and former police officer Mohsen Al-Sukkari were found guilty of murdering Lebanese singer Tamim in Dubai last July.
Al-Sukkari was convicted of carrying out the murder – a brutal killing in which Tamim was stabbed several times and had her throat slit – at the behest of Moustafa, who was romantically linked with the singer in the past, according to his lawyer.
The court report highlighted 16 points of evidence it felt proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Moustafa and Al-Sukkari were behind Tamim’s murder, which they described as a “low conspiracy to kill a weak woman.
Evidence included in the report which the court used to reach its verdict included witness testimonies, whether in Dubai or Cairo, as well as forensic reports and video evidence from Dubai.
Phone calls between Al-Sukkari and Moustafa which the former had recorded were not submitted as evidence because they were not obtained by a prosecutor’s order. However, the court did consider that calls were made between around the time the murder was committed.
According to the report, Tamim met Moustafa in Cairo and a relationship ensued, with Moustafa putting her up in a suite at the Four Seasons hotel, which he partly owns. He also paid her estranged husband Adel Al Matouq $1.25 million to finalize their divorce.
Things took a turn for the worse between the two. Tamim went to London to stay with her uncle, consistently refusing Moustafa’s pleas to return to Cairo. He then hired Al-Sukkari, a former anti-terrorism expert in State Security and then the head of security at the Four Seasons hotel in Sharm El-Sheikh, to trace her and kidnap her, bringing her back to Cairo.
However, the report says, he could not find Tamim in London, who by then was in a relationship with Iraqi-British boxer Riyad El-Ezzawy. When Tamim went to Dubai with Ezzawy and bought an apartment with money Moustafa had given her, he was extremely angered, the court report said.
It was at that point that he asked Al-Sukkari to kill her in Dubai.
Al-Sukkari was arrested immediately and Moustafa was taken into custody in September. The trial began in mid-October.
